Catherine Duncan has revealed the seven phrases she hears most often from people in their final moments of life.
Duncan, a spiritual consultant who has sat with thousands of dying people, shared the common themes in a TikTok video that has drawn more than 37,000 likes. She told her followers that a clear pattern emerges when people approach death.
“They speak of loved ones waiting for them on the other side, of a journey that is just beginning, and of a beauty that is invisible to the living,” she wrote on the platform.
The expert maintains that death represents a transition rather than an ending. She claims that “death is not the end” and instead describes it as a shift to another state of being.
Duncan’s observations add to a growing body of testimony from professionals who work closely with the dying. Medical and spiritual experts have increasingly spoken publicly about what they witness at life’s edge.
Shoshana Ungerleider, an internal medicine specialist, previously told CNBC Make It about a different but related phenomenon: the regrets that surface near death. Many people, she noted, express sorrow about not spending enough time with loved ones. Others lament working excessively and missing out on life as a result.
Ungerleider’s medical perspective complements Duncan’s spiritual framework, together sketching a picture of how awareness shifts when mortality becomes immediate. Where Duncan emphasizes transcendence and connection to unseen realms, Ungerleider highlights earthly reflection and unfulfilled relational needs.
Duncan’s seven common phrases center on continuity and reunion rather than finality. The specifics she enumerated on TikTok cluster around perceptions of waiting loved ones, beginnings disguised as endings, and perceptions of beauty inaccessible to the living.
The contrast between the two experts’ focal points — Duncan on what the dying anticipate, Ungerleider on what they look back upon — suggests that final consciousness may contain multiple layers simultaneously. The forward-looking and backward-looking impulses appear to coexist, though individual experiences vary.
Neither expert claims universal applicability for their observations. Both speak from accumulated professional exposure rather than systematic study. Duncan’s thousands of bedside hours and Ungerleider’s clinical practice inform perspectives that have found audiences through social media and business journalism respectively.
The viral spread of Duncan’s TikTok video indicates sustained public curiosity about deathbed experience. Previous cultural touchstones, from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stage theory to more recent near-death account collections, have similarly attracted widespread attention.
Duncan’s framing of death as transition rather than termination aligns with perspectives found across multiple spiritual traditions. Her specific phrasing about “a beauty that is invisible to the living” evokes longstanding mystical and religious literatures describing perceived otherworldly vistas.
The platform dynamics matter: TikTok’s algorithm has amplified content about mortality in ways that earlier media formats could not, allowing a spiritual consultant to reach audiences previously accessible mainly through books or broadcast appearances. The 37,000 likes represent engagement with existential content in a format typically associated with lighter material.
Ungerleider’s CNBC Make It interview, by contrast, reached audiences through business-oriented journalism, suggesting that end-of-life insights now circulate through multiple demographic channels simultaneously. The medical credentialing may lend authority in contexts where spiritual expertise receives skepticism.
Both experts emphasize what becomes visible to consciousness when ordinary life recedes: for Duncan, unseen presences and beauty; for Ungerleider, the actual weight of time allocation decisions. The dying, in these accounts, gain clarity that was available but unaccessed during health.